Canonical

Canonical URL

What is Canonical?

A canonical is a tag placed on a page to mark which address is the correct one when the same content is reachable from several URLs. It's written as a link tag with rel set to canonical inside the HTML head. It keeps campaign parameters, www and non-www versions, or duplicate pages from competing with each other or splitting authority between them. It's a strong recommendation, not an order: a search engine can still decide on its own that a different URL is the right one.

Related terms

robots.txt

The file that tells crawlers which parts of your site they can access.

Crawl budget

How many pages a crawler is willing to request from you in a given period.

Structured data

Tags that tell a machine what each piece of your page means.

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